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I think Apple may be in the process of being enshittified. Stuff like this, their complete failure to do anything useful with AI, the anti-accessibility of a Liquid Glass, and the simple observation of how many things in the Apple ecosystem don’t “just work” is making me feel like giving up on it.

I spend an enormous amount of money on Apple products, and increasingly they lead to frustration and anger at the thoughtlessness and plain shittiness of them. I’m really wondering why I bother. They clearly don’t have my interests in mind.

People pay for software all the time. Hell I pay $30/month for a fucking email client (Superhuman). But no one has tried it for a social network. I think the problem is that people think a social network is worthless unless you hit Twitter scale, but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work. People are now saying that Discord is being enshittified, right on schedule. Maybe there's an opportunity to poach some communities.

Does anyone else feel like at some point reality turned into an unpublished Neal Stephenson novel?

Subtext: If you’re not under 30, with great eyesight, fuck you. If you’re neurodivergent, fuck you. If you just want to use your technology to do useful things and don’t need to be “delighted” by every button press and interaction, fuck you.

I don’t see how this won’t disable a lot of people. It’s cruel.

The section where they talk about how it adapts to different situations so that it still shows the top layer information did not inspire hope. I’m autistic and I have a hard time picking out signal from a noisy background easily. In the demo, it’s as if the icons are constantly dancing (delightfully, no doubt) but the information is lost.

For those that say that Apple always has accessibility settings where you can lessen effects like this, that’s not enough. We’re techies. We know about fiddling with settings. A lot of people won’t know. A lot of people that will be affected by this won’t consider themselves disabled, so they don’t even know the word “accessibility”. It’ll just subtly make every interaction with their technology more difficult and more stressful.

They can’t. They never will. That’s a different problem than the one they were built for. If we want AI that’s able to determine truth, it’s not going to come from LLMs.

The type of person that would do that would have done the same thing without LLMs. LLMs don’t change anything except now they can just create their big ball of mud faster.

The pain of shitty code doesn’t go away. They can ship your crappy MVP faster, but technical debt doesn’t magically go away.

This is an awesome opportunity for those people to start learning how to do software design instead of just “programming”. People that don’t are going to be left behind.

I don’t know about fixing python types, but fixing typescript types can be very time consuming. A LOT of programming work is like this —- not solving anything interesting or difficult, but just time-consuming drudgery.

These tools have turned out to be great at this stuff. I don’t think I’ve turned over any interesting problems to an LLM and had it go well, but by using them to take care of drudgery, I have a lot more time to think about the interesting problems.

I would suggest that instead of asking people to post their work, try it out on whatever bullshit tasks you’ve been avoiding. And I specifically mean “tasks”. Stuff where the problem has already been solved a thousand times before.

Everyone affected by this will know to look for those deeply nested setting, right? Or will the 70 year old with bad eyesight just stop being able to use their phone? Or use it a lot less, or be frustrated and stressed by it? A lot of people don’t bother fiddling with their settings and just take what they’re given.

I’m not just thinking of myself here. I’m concerned that a lot of people who don’t consider themselves disabled will be disabled by this.

Autistic people tend to have very different sensory sensitivities than neurotypical people. Most are very highly sensitive and tend have trouble picking out a signal when there’s too much noise around it.

To me, being socially awkward is kind of a secondary, less important trait, but that’s the one everyone seems to notice. We’re weird on the outside because inside, we’re dealing with overwhelming sensory input.

Oh no. It looks like every button and menu is now a translucent layer, so that any noise from the background shows through and muddles the text. This seems like an accessibility nightmare.

Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just like a movie. Big whoop.

I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.

If I’ve learned anything from the past few decades, something completely unexpected and even weirder than both will happen.

How are people using Claude Code day to day without spending a lot? I tried it on a moderately complex task and it chewed through tokens at an alarming rate. I quickly spent $2 and hadn’t even arrived at an adequate solution yet. I’ve heard other people say they’ve spent $10-20 in a coding session. I don’t see how that’s sustainable for me, so I’ve stuck with my $20/month Cursor subscription.

I’m conflicted about this as well. I’ve had a range of chronic illnesses my whole life. I’d love it if there was useful research into them. But after seeing decades with no progress, I have to conclude that most medical research into chronic illnesses is going in the wrong direction.

Most research is still following a medical model that worked for infectious diseases in the 1950s but does not yield any meaningful information or treatments for chronic, complex disorders that have multiple interrelated factors.

And since doctors are trained primarily in the treatment of acute diseases, even the useful information that’s found by research is largely ignored in practice. The ignorance of the average MD about chronic illnesses is astounding.

I’ve been sick for the last two years and I’ve given up going to doctors. They are a waste of my time. I’ve done much better by doing my own research and treating myself. Much of what’s helped has been stuff that I’ve seen described as pseudoscience, even though it’s empirically based, because there aren’t enough RCTs for it to qualify as “evidence”. This makes me incredibly angry.

The system is utterly broken. I’d like to scrap the whole thing and start over. Hopefully, we’ll find a way to start over when the smoke clears.

Trust me, I am under enormous stress and pressure right now, more than at any other time in my life. I’m not someone sitting on a mountaintop, free of all cares. I’m someone trapped in a box that’s sinking under the waves, desperately trying to find a way to escape.

I approach problems with curiosity because I know that this is the only way I’ll find a way to survive and thrive again.

> a novice who outsources their thinking to an LLM or an agent (or both) will never develop those skills on their own. So where will the experts come from?

Well, if you’re a novice, don’t do that. I learn things from LLMs all the time. I get them to solve a problem that I’m pretty sure can be solved using some API that I’m only vaguely aware of, and when they solve it, I read the code so I can understand it. Then, almost always, I pick it apart and refactor it.

Hell, just yesterday I was curious about how signals work under the hood, so I had an LLM give me a simple example, then we picked it apart. These things can be amazing tutors if you’re curious. I’m insatiably curious, so I’m learning a lot.

Junior engineers should not vibe code. They should use LLMs as pair programmers to learn. If they don’t, that’s on them. Is it a dicey situation? Yeah. But there’s no turning back the clock. This is the world we have. They still have a path if they want it and have curiosity.

Bugs? Those are grubby human work.

Seriously, everyone should get good at fixing bugs. LLMs are terrible at it when it’s slightly non-obvious and since everyone is focusing on vibe coding, I doubt they’ll get any better.

The swirly effects are probably used to distract from the problems of getting realism right.

Depending on corporations to have a moral foundation is a losing bet. It has to come from the outside.

Here’s a possible out: Senior engineers stop working huge corporations and use these tools to start their own businesses. (Given today’s hiring situation, this may not even be a choice.) As the business grows, hire junior developers as apprentices to handle day to day tasks while senior engineer works on bigger picture stuff. Junior engineer grows into a senior engineer who eventually uses AI to start their own business. This is a very abbreviated version of what I hope I can do, at least.

Won’t these just make it less likely that you can publish your work, and end up damaging your career in the short term? As opposed to getting published, having a career, with a long tail risk of being found out later?

And you could mitigate that risk by publishing research that doesn’t really matter, so no one ever checks.

Please give specific examples. I keep seeing vague comments like this about her, but very little in the way of specifics. Without specifics, this is just ad hominem rumor mongering.

I saw one startup with about fifty engineers, and dozens of services. They had all of the problems that the post describes. Getting anything done was nearly impossible until you were in the system for at least six months and knew how to work around all the issues.

Here’s the kicker: They only had a few hundred MAUs. Not hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of users. So all this complexity was for nothing. They burned through $50M in VC money then went under. It’s a shame because their core product was very innovative and well architected, but it didn’t matter.

I wish we called hallucinations what they really are: bullshit. LLMs don’t perceive, so they can’t hallucinate. When a person bullshits, they’re not hallucinating or lying, they’re simply unconcerned with truth. They’re more interested in telling a good, coherent narrative, even if it’s not true.

I think this need to bullshit is probably inherent in LLMs. It’s essentially what they are built to do: take a text input and transform it into a coherent text output. Truth is irrelevant. The surprising thing is that they can ever get the right answer at all, not that they bullshit so much.

This isn’t programming. It’s transclusion[0]. Essentially, iframes and images are already forms of transclusion, so why not transclude html and have the iframe expand to fit the content?

As I wrote that, I realized there could be cumulative layout shift, so that’s an argument against. To avoid that, the browser would have to download all transcluded content before rendering. In the past, this would have been a dealbreaker, but maybe it’s more feasible now with http multiplexing.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion#Client-side_HTM...

I would guess that for every app that was vibe coded and made $80k in revenue, there are thousands of attempts that went off a cliff or into a wall, generating $0 revenue and wasting a human’s time. So it’s just survivorship bias. Sure, it’s possible to make something useful, but you will probably fail.

I’m using AI to increase my productivity, but whenever I’ve vibe coded (not intentionally, just by getting caught up in the dumb vibes) I’ve regretted it. I’ve ended up with a tangled mess.

I know it’s possible to work around it, but that’s not the point. This is such a common use case that it seems worthwhile to pave the cowpath. We’ve paved a lot of cowpaths that are far less trodden than this one. This is practically a cow superhighway.

We’ve built an industry around solving this problem. What if, for some basic web publishing use cases, we could replace a complex web framework with one new tag?

This was the rabbit hole that I started down in the late 90s and still haven’t come out of. I was the webmaster of the Analog Science Fiction website and I was building tons of static pages, each with the same header and side bar. It drove me nuts. So I did some research and found out about Apache server side includes. Woo hoo! Keeping it DRY (before I knew DRY was a thing).

Yeah, we’ve been solving this over and over in different ways. For those saying that iframes are good enough, they’re not. Iframes don’t expand to fit content. And server side solutions require a server. Why not have a simple client side method for this? I think it’s a valid question. Now that we’re fixing a lot of the irritation in web development, it seems worth considering.

Don’t get them to make design decisions. They can’t do it.

Often, I use LLMs to write the V1 of whatever module I’m working on. I try to get it to do the simplest thing that works and that’s it. Then I refactor it to be good. This is how I worked before LLMs already: do the simplest thing that works, even if it’s sloppy and dumb, then refactor. The LLM just lets me skip that first step (sometimes). Over time, I’m building up a file of coding standards for them to follow, so their V1 doesn’t require as much refactoring, but they never get it “right”.

Sometimes they’ll go off into lalaland with stuff that’s so over complicated that I ignore it. The key was noticing when it was going down some dumb rabbit hole and bailing out quick. They never turn back. They’ll always come up with another dumb solution to fix the problem they never should have created in the first place.

I feel like they bit off more than they can chew. I want to like it, too. But they’re trying to create a whole new JavaScript ecosystem from the ground up, and a lot of it depends on maintaining a seamless compatibility layer that’s always a moving target.

It’s not just node. They have Fresh, which depends on Preact, which is a compatibility layer over the React API. Why? To save a few K on bundle size? They have JSR. Why?

The sales pitch is great: Typescript that just works. But in my experience, it didn’t “just work”. I tried building something with Fresh and ran into issues immediately. I bailed out.

> Shareholders are not the all and everything of a company.

I agree with you. But what you or I think doesn't matter.

> This is how the whole system is supposed to work.

My point is that our current form of capitalism is designed to work this way, but there's no requirement that capitalism must work this way. This is just the toxic form of market economy that we ended up with.

I agree with all of this and hope it comes to pass. I don’t see how it’s possible without drastically changing the capitalist values that underpin our society.

I think capitalism is the best way to structure an economy, but it’s a terrible way to structure a society. Nowadays, we use capitalist values as the benchmark for what matters in almost every context, and then we wonder why our society is a dystopia.